Teaching with the Macaulay Library: An Online Archive of Animal Behavior Recordings

Abstract

Using video and audio recordings of animal behavior, students in a variety of courses can pose questions and gather data from diverse species and locations to test their hypotheses. Such recordings are freely available online in the Macaulay Library, the world’s largest scientifically curated archive of natural history media. Managed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the Macaulay Library currently houses about 50,000 video clips and 123,300 audio recordings (including the sounds of 75 percent of the world’s bird species, and recordings dating back to 1929). This article, aimed at faculty teaching biology and environmental science courses, summarizes how to search the online archive and visualize streaming sound files with Raven Viewer. It also describes how instructors have used these tools in introductory and upper-level laboratory and lecture classes as part of the NSF-funded Online Research in Biology project.